Category: Philosophy (other)

Keith Ward on Materialism, 7     1  2  3  4  5  6

But philosophy is “still a very diverse discipline”, Ward notes, and he proceeds to give an overview of the academic discipline of philosophy today, in order to show how very few the materialist philosophers actually are: “Idealism, the view that mind or Spirit is the only ultimate reality, is far from dead, and many American university philosophy departments have a representative Process philosopher or Personalist – both variant forms of Idealism.”

It can be added that European university philosophy departments also have representative idealist philosophers. They include Oxford’s, where my second D.Phil. supervisor was one – even, as a Bradleyan, in the specific, Victorian Oxford tradition of idealism, focusing, like most contemporary idealists both of necessity and by inclination, on the history of philosophy. Idealists are also found on the European continent, although philosophers working with the historical tradition of German idealism focus on other aspect of it than idealism in the general sense in which Ward understands it.

But Ward is right to establish here that idealism and personalism are living philosophical positions and traditions, represented in academic philosophy today. And, of course, “Phenomenology, the general view that analysis of existential, lived experience should be the basis of an analysis of reality, remains strong in European philosophy.” Phenomenology was from the beginning (in Husserl) opposed to the nineteenth-century tradition of idealism, yet its approach is not only in some central respects congruent with it, but something similar was part of idealism in some forms, as a point of departure. The term phenomenology was of course introduced and frequently used precisely by the idealists. In some respects, phenomenology is part of the broad current of irrationalism and subjectivism in modern German philosophy, and consequently its rejection of idealism in the broad sense is untenable. A revised version of Hegelian dialectics, for instance, provides the means through which precisely the irrationalism and subjectivism can be overcome.

Irrationalism and subjectivism are also found in positivism. Ward writes: “Positivists also make experience primary, though they apparently have few feelings or existential crises, and prefer to have clear, distinct and unemotional experiences (which they call sense-data). Positivists have tended to think that their sense-observations are the basic data of rigorous science, and so they place a premium on sense-verification and the provision of sense-based evidence for all assertions. But positivism actually undermines the possibility of public verification (since we cannot even verify that other minds exist), and it also undermines the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.”

This is rather a comment on the primacy of experience à propos of phenomenology, not part of the overview of contemporary philosophy. But the positivists’ theory of sense-data, phenomenalism, is, like parts of the approach of the phenomenologists, in some respects and with a certain interpretation compatible with idealism, if only, of course, with the further development and not least supplementation. that idealism provides. Sense-data are not all the data and they certainly do not have the significance in philosophy that positivists ascribed to them (“evidence for all assertions”).

Yet Ward’s main point is that logical positivism was not materialism. That is also true of general common-sense pragmatism. “Common-sense pragmatism, often in a Wittgensteinian guise, sceptical of all grand general statements about ultimate reality, and refusing to accept that philosophers are in any better position to say what reality is like than anyone else, is widespread. Such philosophers are fond of saying, ‘Reality is in order as it is’, without the help of philosophy. So their arguments are often devoted to proving that philosophical arguments in general are superfluous and misleading. The problem is that, when readers begin to believe them, they stop reading philosophy any more. This has regrettably caused a number of philosophy departments in Britain to close.” Common-sense pragmatism, as paradoxically claiming to be a philosophical position, is also regrettable in itself, on many counts, and, I think, refutable (like materialism), in the sense in which things are at all refutable by philosophy. But again, Ward’s main point is that it is not materialism.

Then, “Scepticism, too, is far from dead, and resembles common-sense, except that it even doubts whether common-sense can be trusted. Some forms of post-modernism are sceptical views, insofar as they doubt whether there is any objective truth to be found.” Ward adds that sceptics tend to get very depressed and that they too tend to give up philosophy. This position too is thus bad for philosophy. Like materialism and common-sense pragmatism, it too seems to me philosophically refutable.

Then there is critical realism, which is “quite popular. An intellectual descendent of John Locke, such realism maintains that perception and intellect do give us knowledge of objective reality, but show reality to be rather different from how things appear to the senses. Proponents disagree on just how different. For Locke a set of primary qualities – roughly, mass, position and velocity – are objectively real, while secondary qualities like smell, colour and taste are contributed by the mind. In modern physics those primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time. So sometimes critical realists are reduced to saying that there is definitely some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes. But exactly what it is we cannot be sure. It is what quantum theorist Bernard d’Espagnat calls a ‘veiled reality’, since we cannot know exactly what concepts like ‘imaginary time’ or ‘waves of probability’ correspond to, if correspondence is even an appropriate term any more. As one critical realist has said, ‘I cannot be sure just what objective reality is. But whatever it is, I most certainly believe in it.'”

Critical realists of this kind may not be far from idealism. One problem here is that few of them understand what idealism is, and what it means, and that it is possible to enter upon the intellectual path that takes them there. Critical realism is certainly not materialism: “The dogmatism of materialism is very apparent when placed alongside these other more or less widely held philosophical theses. Materialists are metaphysicians in the grand manner. They claim to know what reality is, and that their description of it is, they think, obvious, accurate and rationally undeniable. Since that claim is doubted by most of their colleagues, it can hardly be quite as obvious as they say.”

Some idealists too would clearly be described by many as metaphysicians in the grand manner. But I do not think their claim to know what reality is and their description of reality have to be set forth in a particularly dogmatic manner, or, for that matter, an arrogant or aggressive manner. Organized theistic religion, as sharing the idealist worldview in the broad sense, and certainly understood as such by Ward, of course sometimes does present it in this way, since it, or at least much of it, articulates its beliefs and teachings in the form of dogma. But not even the way in which idealism in this broad sense is taught in the partly extra-philosophical traditions, like the esoteric tradition in the West or the Vedantic tradition, need to be dogmatic in its modality, in the sense Ward has in mind here when speaking of the materialists. It can be polemical and sometimes perhaps has to, but this is not at all primary. It just sets forth the traditional truths and principles in its own modality of utterance, sometimes adjusted to time and circumstance. And within philosophy, the traditional intellectual and discursive practices of that specific Western discipline in themselves counteract and discourage dogmatism (I am not talking here about dogmatism in the specifically Kantian sense, which can be non-dogmatic in the sense in which I here use the term).

It is significant that the materialists that most influence the popular debate are not philosophers, but modern scientists writing for the general reading public. As modern scientists, they are products of the historical separation of science from philosophy, they do not have a philosophical education, and they do not fully understand philosophy and what philosophy really is. This is what produces much of their dogmatism, and lands them in hopeless contradictions and other intellectual absurdities when they try to defend their materialism against philosophers. It seems that, without the proper perspective on what they themselves are doing, they also do not quite understand what science is.

In reviewing contemporary philosophy, Ward also, in the paragraphs cited, anticipates the discussion of some main parts of the contemporary case for idealism. He has spoken of “the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.” He has said that “In modern physics [Locke’s] primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time.” He has mentioned “some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes”. These parts of the case are what he will next focus on in this summary statement.

It seems there are problems viewing the video here below in this post, so go to Vimeo instead (there are some disturbing sounds the first few minutes). I wish to draw the reader’s/viewer’s attention to my general discussion, in the post ‘The Case for Idealism and Personalism’, about the kind of case Ward makes.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 6     1  2  3  4  5

“It is easy to forget how very recent and meteoric the rise of materialism has been in philosophy”, Ward further explains. “How could it get from being a joke to being a claimant to obvious truth in forty years? I think there have been two major factors at work. One is the rise of cynicism about any sort of idealistic approach to life, about all human institutions, including religious ones, and about the failures of religious people to prevent violence and hatred, and indeed their tendency to increase violence and hatred in the world.”

Here it seems important to make a distinction with regard to the “idealistic approach to life”. It is true to say that there has been a rise of cynicism about “any sort of” such approach. But I think there are nonetheless two basically different sorts that must be kept apart.

One is the strictly philosophical, metaphysical, religious and traditionalist, which may or may not express itself in moral and social concerns, but which, when it does, is allied to a proper, classical and indeed classicist humanistic view of man, based on ethical dualism and realistic discernment with regard to the nature of man, society and the world (something which does not preclude the acceptance and incorporation of the important partial truths of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, or modernity in general, which can contribute to creative renewal of tradition and beneficent change). This is the idealistic approach to life which I am inclined to defend.

The other is the modern romantic and rationalist one which Irving Babbitt calls humanitarian, an undiscerning, illusorily progressivist pseudo-idealism based on a facile, immanentizing modern pantheism and monism in its view of both man and the world. Such idealism often had no problems accepting, in practice at least, materialism as sound, and to affirm it as part of an expression of honest, emancipated, sensual life-affirmation against the bigoted metaphysical idealism and religion of the reactionaries. There is certainly cynicism today about this form of idealism too; the liberals and leftists who used to believe in it are indeed often cynics and rather nihilists in both theory and practice. (There is a third sense of idealism, namely unselfish commitment to things believed in, and various associated qualities. This sense is not really determined by what those things are, but it often merges with the second sense by the addition of the characteristics of humanitarianism.)

This disillusion is made inevitable by the illusoriness of this kind of idealism itself; it was prefigured already in the nineteenth century and has been thoroughly analysed and explained by Babbitt and others. The problem is that it affects also the understanding of and attitude towards the first, genuine form of idealism.

Ward observes that the cynicism “has been largely motivated by the Marxist ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, the accusation that all religious and moral systems are in fact ideologies, no more than sophisticated disguises for egoistic self-seeking on the part of their proponents”. Ward rightly uses the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” about Marxism, but it should be pointed out that this is not an exclusively Marxist phenomenon. As I remember it, it was introduced by Ricoeur for the purpose of describing a wider range of such hermeneutics, including those of Nietzsche and Freud. The reason Ward does not mention this is perhaps that he does not regard Nietzsche as a materialist, and it is certainly true that those other forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion are more relevant for the understanding of general non- and anti-idealism rather than for materialism specifically.

But classical philosophy “can thus be seen as a disguise for elitist social systems that privilege the sort of cultivated discussion that only leisure and wealth can bring. The realities of life lie further down, in work and physical effort. The material is the real, while the spiritual is a fictitious construct to delude the oppressed and keep them in their place.” Ward enters into the kind of extra-philosophical explanation in terms of an analysis of political and cultural history, psychology etc. which I mentioned as required. He does so both because the extra-philosophical agenda and motivation are obvious, but also because the weakness of materialism as philosophy proper calls for such explanation.

The philosophical arguments of materialism should of course not simply be reduced to and explained in terms of something else, but considered in themselves. But on the condition that they are also considered as such, other explanation is legitimate in the case where other motivation than the purely philosophical is obviously at work. Such explanation of idealism is of course attempted by materialists when they perceive other forces and interests as being involved. The problem is that they do so often inadmissibly reduce and explain away the arguments in terms of those other factors.

As we see, Ward immediately identifies the relation between the growth of materialism and its becoming part of a political ideology as central to the needed explanation: “When Karl Marx boasted that he had taken the philosophy of Hegel, and stood it on its head, so that the world is not the self-expression of Absolute Spirit, as in Hegel, but a purposeless and violent by-product of blind material forces, he described the dethronement of Spiritual reality exactly. The irony is that Capitalists as well as Marxists fell under this revolutionary spell. Capitalists may have resisted the idea of a centralised State-run economy, but they often fell completely for the idea that ‘realism’ requires that the profit-motive (the morally neutral capacity to satisfy any or all desires) is the real driving force of history, and that spiritual ideals are artificial stimulants to distract the attention of the toiling masses.”

It could of course be argued that the capitalists had this orientation even before Marx, ever since the classical liberals and classical political economy, and that it was quite as much Marx who took it over from them, as well as from others. Yet Marxism in its many forms remains a major cause of the ascendancy of materialism, even though many who consider themselves materialists are not aware that to a considerable extent this is why they do so.

Despite the incessant insistence throughout the twentieth century that materialists are often good and morally upright people while religious and metaphysically idealist people are evil, oppressive hypocrites,  and indeed the obvious truth of this insistence in many cases, what we have long seen before us is a culture continuously declining under the impact of materialism, along with public and private morality. Materialism often has very real existential consequences, both for the materialists themselves, decisively shaping their lives, their personal development and their spiritual destinies, and for the lives of others who live together with them. Although theoretical and practical materialism are different things, and although theoretical idealists can be practical materialists and theoretical materialists can be practical idealists, they are nevertheless related things.

It was obvious from the beginning that the problem of materialism had a political dimension or a dimension of political philosophy and ideology, a dimension which had to be addressed as such. Opposing materialism had to involve opposing Marxism, or Marxism as materialism, as including the affirmation of matter as what Marx considered matter to be. Understandably, and in strict accordance with Marxist ideology, idealism, in a vague sense, was always a main enemy in the rhetoric of the communist regimes, and sometimes personalism too. But opposing materialism also had to involve opposing capitalism and the main forms of liberalism, for the reason Ward mentions.

Most materialist radicals were once idealists in the second sense described above. They opposed what they perceived to be the narrow-minded, egotistical and materialistic conservatives. Needless to say, there were such conservatives, conservatives who were certainly not idealists in the first sense. There were decisive partial truths in the radicals’ criticism, truths which of course need to be affirmed and assimilated by the creative traditionalist defender of an alternative modernity. Marxists opposed idealism because it was perceived to be only an obstacle to the spread of the truths of historical and dialectical materialism. They rejected personalism because it saw the person it defended as only the bourgeois individual that was the class enemy. They turned against Christianity and the churches because they were inextricable ideological parts of the oppressive power-structures of the remaining, semi-feudal class society. But it soon turned out the whole truth was different and much more complex than the radicals thought.

There are, of course, also other reasons for the ascendancy of materialism: “In addition to this sense that the material, not the spiritual, is the driving-force of history, the incredible progress of the natural sciences is the second major factor that has contributed to the rise of materialism.” Ward gives examples of this from cosmology, genetics, and brain and computer science, examples of how developments in those fields have made materialism seem more plausible. These examples, which I will not cite here, do not make it particularly clear to me why this should necessarily be so. And Ward will soon proceed to show how other developments in science have rather made materialism seem utterly implausible.

But, Ward says, “It can look as if our increasing knowledge of physical processes is at last revealing the secrets of consciousness and thought. It is not only ideas that are ideological constructs. Now minds themselves are often seen as illusions produced by physical processes in the brain.” I have to admit I have always found it impossible to understand how people can experience themselves and reality in this way. Is it really true that there are people who see their minds, consciousness and thought as illusions? Ward’s further description hardly makes it more comprehensible:

“Classical philosophers began from what was most evident to them – their own experiences and thoughts. But now science seems to some to show that experiences are by-products of brain-processes, and brains can function very well whether or not conscious experiences exist. Thoughts are the dimly perceived epiphenomena of computational sequences in the brain-computer, which are the really effective causes of all our apparently mental behaviour. Marxism dethroned Spirit from having a primary role in how the world is. Science has dethroned consciousness from having a primary role in our understanding of the world. Thus materialism pricks the bubble of our spiritual illusions, and reveals that we are in fact computational, inefficiently designed and largely malfunctioning, physical entities without any larger purpose or meaning within the blind, pointless, freak accident of a wholly physical universe.”

From the Vedantic perspective and that of similar traditions, materialism is of course accounted for in terms of an imperfect awareness of reality caused by ignorance and illusion and a low level of development of consciousness. This, clearly, must on this view be what on the deepest level explains the contemporary materialist view of reality described by Ward, although it has spread due to distinctive historical forces and agendas. As phenomenology too attests, for philosophers to ”begin from” a ”wholly physical universe” etc. and not from ”their own experiences and thoughts”, presupposing that the former and not the latter is ”most evident to them”, involves a strange and inadmissible speculative leap. It is based on illusion.

Despite all the historical developments that have, as it were, facilitated, reinforced and promoted this illusion, Ward still finds the materialist conclusion absurd. Yet the reason some of “the ablest contemporary philosophers” are materialists is, Ward thinks, “partly because it takes a huge amount of logical ingenuity to make the materialist programme seem plausible, so that it is an interesting challenge to good philosophers”. This explanation is revealing with regard to contemporary philosophy and the general cultural and intellectual climate in which it has developed. Later, he returns to the explanation of materialism on a more fundamental and timeless level.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 5     1  2  3  4

“Materialism has rarely seriously been on the agenda of classical philosophy”, Ward says. Materialists are perhaps not quite as rare in European philosophy as in Indian thought (where it is necessarily represented only by those who – and I think there are, before the importation of Western scientisms and Marxism of course, only two schools – position themselves outside of the major spiritual traditions), but it is remarkable that they are not so much less rare as one might think. Before materialism became part of a political ideology, Marxism, they were in fact very few in the West.

The first philosophical formulation of materialism is still relevant to its definition or for accounts of what materialists mean: “Democritus’ theory that nothing finally exists except material particles with mass, position and velocity, interacting with one another in more and more complicated ways, did not have much appeal as a description of the value-laden, complex world of human experience, with all its depths of feeling and varieties of intellectual description.” This points to some of the experience that is part of the philosophical point of departure and basis of personalism, and to the reasons why this experience speaks against materialism. Personalism is, or should be, a form of idealism.

Ward remembers “the occasion when materialism first hit the world of Oxford philosophy”. This is remarkable. Ward was born in 1938. But he is of course not saying materialism had been unknown in Oxford philosophy. Many of the basic materialist positions became prominent in the nineteenth century and had been widely discussed since then, although materialism has certainly been further developed and radicalized in recent decades, a fact which Ward also discusses. What he means here is that materialism was not embraced and defended by Oxford philosophers – that it didn’t quite “hit” it.

Also, he is speaking only of materialism, not of atheism. It is quite possible to be an atheist without being a materialist, like Hume, and Ward notes elsewhere that there are more atheists than materialists in the history of Western philosophy. It is also possible to be a non-materialist but not an idealist. It is all a matter of various levels of experience, insight, and coherence and comprehensiveness of reasoning. But we define materialism here primarily in such a way as to make it impossible to be both a materialist and a theist, or one who affirms the spiritual view of the world – as the position that matter is all there is, the position of reductionist materialism. But the question of this kind of materialism turns out to be inseparable from a secondary definition, the one according to which materialism is merely the affirmation of the existence of such a thing as matter as understood by materialists in itself, with the exception of its quality of being that to which all reality can be reduced.

As late as the early 1960s, reductionist materialism was unknown in Oxford, Ward recounts. There were then “three main Professors of Philosophy in Oxford – Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and R. M. Hare. Hare was an Anglican, Ryle an agnostic, and Ayer an atheist. But they all agreed that materialism was an over-dogmatic, impoverished and over-simplified form of belief that completely failed to account for the sheer diversity of the human world, the importance of human experience, and the exigencies of morality.” This is clearly important to note for those who object to other aspects of the work of those non-idealists.

Ward’s account of the “hitting” is fascinating: “I was sitting in one of Gilbert Ryle’s seminars in 1963 when a visiting Australian doctor, David Armstrong, presented a paper defending a materialist theory of mind. I still remember the sense of shock as this heretical Australian laid into Ryle’s concept of mind and insisted on the need for a purely materialist account of consciousness. It seemed so far beyond the bounds of plausibility that some of us were not sure if it was tongue-in-cheek or not.

Well, it was not. And in about forty years materialism, sometimes called ”physicalism”, has risen to a position of such prominence in philosophy that the materialist Daniel Dennett can say, quite falsely in fact, that virtually every serious philosopher is a materialist.”

Early on, I came to think that materialism was in fact philosophically refutable, in the sense in which things are at all refutable by philosophy. I.e., I came to think it was refutable not only in terms of spiritual experience and realization, but on the theoretical level, through the particular intellectual discipline of philosophy. Materialism – all possible variations of Democritus’ basic theory – always seemed unbelievable and often simply absurd to me. Therefore I could never take the materialist or physicalist development in the last forty years, which Ward mentions, quite seriously. I could hardly even really accept it as philosophical.

Not only did the materialists for the most part have an often clearly identifiable agenda and motivation, which are not in themselves of a philosophical nature. And these do require analysis in terms of political and cultural history, psychology, and other perspectives. They also made false claims of the kind Ward cites from Dennett. It is obvious, despite the recent development, not only how many serious philosophers are not materialists, but how many serious philosophers are idealists and personalists.

The exceptionality of materialism implied by the majority consensus is of course also in itself a part of the case, for the obvious reasons that follow from the ones that make the consensus such a part, although it is certainly not in itself a sufficient one.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 4     1  2  3

“That is”, Ward continues, “they have held that ultimate reality has the nature of mind or consciousness, and that the material universe is the appearance or creation of the ultimate mind.” Ward here says that this is what is meant by ”a basically spiritual view of the world”, the view on which there is a broad consensus among classical philosophers.

This is important in itself, being that for which the positive case is made. But it is also necessary for the definition of materialism, in which the decisive thing is the negation of these positions in the name of a different principle, matter. It should be noted that it is possible to define materialism and matter in a different way. All affirmation of the existence of matter does not negate these positions, i.e., is not reductionist. And, with the help of a different concept of matter, materialism too could in fact be defined in an altogether different way, a way that does not contradict idealism, not even the kind of idealism that denies the existence of matter in the ordinary sense(s).

It should also be said that the case against materialism and for the spiritual view of the world” does not imply that the experience of what materialists account for with their concept of matter is not real. Nor is there necessarily anything “wrong” with that experience as such, apart from the kind of practical and moral dimensions which Ward will discuss later. It is just that matter is not what they think it is. Or, perhaps more precisely: what they think is matter is not what they think matter is.

But we mean here by the terms materialism and matter what the philosophers Ward refers to meant by them, and also what philosophers who have regarded and today regard themselves as materialists mean by them. Inasmuch as they do not all mean precisely the same, these are broad concepts. But this does not make any difference for the basic case, as long as the definition includes the negation of the central positions here formulated by Ward.

With regard to the question of the existence and nature of a ”material universe”, Ward includes philosophers who and forms of idealism in the broad sense which accept the existence of a universe which is really material in the sense accepted here. I.e., they accept the existence of matter without being materialists. Only they do not regard it as ”ultlimate reality”. Other forms of idealism do not accept the existence of such a universe, the existence of matter.

”Appearance” is an important word in this connection and in many forms of idealism; it is appropriate also for accounts of some central Eastern traditions. But it too can mean different things. It can mean simply non-creational causality, manifestation, emanation. But in addition to this and sometimes even instead of this it can also mean – and Ward certainly has this in mind too, having used the formulation ”ultimate reality” of that which is not appearance – that which is not real or fully real, not as real as that of which it is an appearance, and in which there is an element of illusion.

“Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and many others all shared this general view”, Ward reminds us. And it can of course be noticed how many the ”many others” are: some of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, the late medieval Franciscans, the Renaissance Platonists (not just the Italian but also the Cambridge ones), the rest of the German Idealists and the nineteenth-century idealists in France, Britain, America and elsewhere. Ward soon notes how few the materialists really are.

Even Hume, “a philosopher opposed to religious belief, who denied the existence of ultimate mind, did not suppose that matter could be ultimately real. Indeed, he thought that the material universe was a construct out of ‘impressions’ or ‘ideas’, and had no objective reality, or at least not a reality that could be rationally established.” This is of course only an argument against materialism. It could perhaps be clarified that it is ”the material universe”, i.e. a universe of matter as conceived by materialists, lumps of matter, like atoms, floating about out there in objective, absolute time and space, that has ”no objective reality, or at least not a reality that could be rationally established” – not what Hume regards as ”a construct out of ’impressions’ or ’ideas’”. The latter might be a valid expression of what the universe that materialists hold to be material actually is, but contrary to the purportedly material universe it does have objective reality of a different kind, a reality which can be rationally established. This, after all, is part of what is meant when Ward says with the classical, in a broad sense idealist tradition, as he does elsewhere, that the world is intelligible.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 3     1  2

I will, of course, leave out some parts of Ward’s text, like the last part of the first sentence where he mentions Nietzsche. The discussion of Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) in The God Conclusion is of interest but not central enough to the case for idealism and personalism to be commented on here, so I will leave out the few references to it in this last chapter. Ward goes on to say: “I have shown how the great majority of these philosophers have expounded a basically spiritual view of reality.”

This is a wonderfully simple truth. Bracket for a moment all considerations of history, contexts, motives, speech acts, paradigms, epistemes, power-relations etc. that come to mind. Disregard the differences between the classical philosophers on other, less basic levels of issues. Just let the basic truth here expressed sink in. There is consensus, agreement, among the great majority of ”these philosophers”, i.e., according to the preceding sentence, among the great majority of ”some of the classical philosophers of the European tradition”, that reality is basically spiritual.

Most people have some understanding of the  concept ”spiritual”, and the language here easily and obviously conveys sufficient meaning and also quite satisfactory clarity and precision of meaning. Properly read, the metaphysical meaning of the sentence, despite the fact that it is merely written, is present in a way that could be described as in a certain sense logocentric.

Again, the great majority of some of the classical philosophers refer to something similar or even, conceived in the general way that is conveyed by the choice of the term ”spiritual”, identical. The ”reality” intended in this formulation of the shared view is conceived to be the basic reality, which can also be understood to mean the ultimate or highest reality. As such, it is also universal and independent of history, contexts etc., i.e. of phenomenal relativity. This in turn implies that all truths regarding phenomenal relativity, except the general truth of phenomenal relativity as being precisely phenomenal relativity, are relative, subordinate truths which do not affect or change the basic reality agreed to be spiritual.

The use of the term spiritual of course points directly, past idealism, to spirituality. The simplicity is beautiful. By this term, the depths and heights are already indicated – the horizon of real life. The spiritually highly developed and mature reader, whether learned or not, may go directly from here to guru, the genuine spiritual teacher. Guru is situated beyond philosophy. Guru is heavy, weighty (this is part of the etymology of the Sanskrit term), because he is present with what in the West could be conceived as logocentric truth and reality. Guru gives or shares that truth and that reality, the spiritual reality that is the basic reality. Guru will show the reader concretely, directly, experientially, what spirituality is, what the referent of the concept is. Guru will take him into the spiritual life. Everything else may rightly fade into relative insignificance and unreality. Heidegger knew nothing about this, let alone Nietzsche.

The spiritual life is the life that ideally begins where philosophy, successfully pursued, ends. It can be said in one respect to be wisdom, the love of and search for which is what philosophy is or at least what it originally was. Or rather, it can be said to be the goal of wisdom, since wisdom may also exist on the conceptual, ethical, humanistic level only, without developing and blossoming also on the spiritual level.

These considerations go beyond the case for idealism and personalism in terms of the specific discipline of Western philosophy. But they are included here in order to relate that case to the broader concerns of my writing.

Keeping to the philosophical case, we note that the classical philosophers in the European tradition referred to by Ward have conceptually expounded and conveyed the basic spiritual reality to some extent, and the goal and end of the highest wisdom, the attainment of this reality, can be said to be implicitly anticipated in the substance of their consensus and in Ward’s simple summary of it.

While spirituality proper goes beyond idealism as a product or manifestation of Western philosophy, it also includes it. Idealism, as understood by Ward and by me, is the terminological designation of the position or view which conceptually represents the basically spiritual view of the world (there are other, more limited definitions in modern philosophy). But it can also comprise in its signification at least large parts of the esoteric traditions of the West which, ever since antiquity, are to a considerable extent spiritual traditions which transcend philosophy yet sometimes overlap or merge with idealist philosophy. And the term can be used, as I sometimes do, to describe the spiritual teachings of the East. But it is then often important to keep in mind the distinct Western meanings and uses not only of the term idealism but also of the term spiritual. Ward has no reason to enter here into such distinctions, however. For his purposes, his usage is not just legitimately but constructively and fruitfully ”loose”.

Like the predominant idealism of the East which the comparative study of the global heritage of thought brings to light (for Westerners who might still not be aware of it), this consensus of the classical European philosophers is in itself highly significant. The number and stature of the thinkers speak in favour of the basically spiritual view of reality, and is thus part of the case for idealism and in some respects indirectly of the case for personalism, which is in those respects the same case. Each of the philosophers referred to possesses a real degree of authority, and the shared general position has a real degree of authority both because of the authority of the individual philosophers and due to the fact of its being shared by them. The case therefore includes the account of this authority and a legitimate appeal to it.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 2     1

I will, then, comment on the concluding chapter (pp. 130-47) of Keith Ward’s short book The God Conclusion: God and the Western Philosophical Tradition. Ward begins the chapter with the following part of the first sentence: “I have been considering the work of some of the classical philosophers of the European tradition”. This raises the question of the nature of philosophy, classical philosophy, and philosophy as a European tradition. It will remind the reader of what I have said about this in the introduction to this case for idealism and personalism by means of commentary, as well as of what I have often said about it elsewhere. For those who have read the book, it also recalls what Ward himself said about this in the Introduction (pp. 2-3):

”I intend to treat matters historically, moving from the ancient Greeks, by way of late medieval Christendom and the Enlightenment, to recent emphasis on problems of consciousness and artificial intelligence. It may seem an unduly European or ’Western’ history. But it is in Europe that philosophy, understood as the pursuit of ciritical and independent thinking, has flourished. It may only be part of a rich and much more varied global heritage of thought. But the problems it has dealt with, and the way it has dealt with them, remain characteristic of a specific tradition of thought that was born in Greece and flourished conspicuously in Europe after the Enlightenment. So it may be seen as one important tradition of human thought.”

As a comparative theologian and philosopher, Ward is of course eminently aware of this. What we will deal with here is the case for idealism and personalism in terms of the specifically Western, more or less institutionalized discipline of philosophy, and as understood within that tradition. This limited project is clearly indicated in Ward’s subtitle, as also, for instance, in the title of his main polemical book against Richard Dawkins, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (2008).

We will keep to this particular discipline of Western philosophy here because this is expected by Western readers, but also because it is helpful, useful, and valuable in itself. It must never imply, however, that thought is limited to this discipline and tradition, even thought on idealism and personalism, although, as such philosophical isms and in the form of such isms, are products specifically of that tradition. Parallel to making the case in terms of Western philosophy, we must also continue to assimilate the comparative perspectives and explore the potential of new developments, deepening, and syntheses in these fields.

For other traditions within the broader global heritage of human thought, as Ward calls it, are clearly also of importance for thinking about idealism and personalism, and primarily the Eastern traditions, the Vedic, the Buddhist, the Taoist and the Confucian. The Western discipline of philosophy should simultaneously be preserved and opened up to such comparative perspectives and the dialogue that this inspires.

This is what Ward has done in the main body of his work. It is also what idealists and personalists have often been pioneers in doing, ever since the nineteenth century: it can often be seen as characteristic of their thinking, and not seldom to distinguish them favourably from the dominant strands of modern or modernist thought which are much more limited in their general outlook.

It is also characteristic of the thinkers that primarily inspired value-centered historicism, namely the New Humanists, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Babbitt studied Sanskrit and Pali and translated the Dhammapada, and was also a keen student of Confucianism and much appreciated in China, where his wife had lived. The early More studied Sanskrit  and contributed to the ongoing introduction in the West of the wisdom of the Upanishads.

Finally, it is fundamental in the work of the strict traditionalist school first established by René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy and represented in Sweden primarily by Tage Lindbom, a school whose broadly, esoterically “idealist” positions I argue must be selectively affirmed within the framework of the broad conception of idealism despite its objection to the term idealism as signifying exclusively one limited speculative school among many with perspectives constitutively limited by the distinctive rational framework and presuppositions of the, in Guénon’s sense, non-traditional Western philosophy as such (Coomaraswamy was more open to the important fact that traditionalist elements were incorporated in philosophy ever since Plato, and that, more generally, philosophy in antiquity, ever since Socrates, had wholly other dimensions than the ones it shared with emergent science, dimensions of the personal cultivation of wisdom, insight, and character through what Pierre Hadot called “exercises spirituels”).

One reason why this consideration of Eastern thought and not just Western philosophy is important, and the most relevant reason in this connection, is that it speaks strongly in favour of idealism broadly conceived, and thus also in favour of personalism, primarily to the extent that the latter is part of and presupposes idealism in general but also inasmuch as there are distinctive counterparts of aspects of  personalism in some Eastern ”schools” of thought (”schools” is another term which from the beginning assumed some distinctive meanings characteristic of the specificity of Western philosophy, and which, as Guénon pointed out, can therefore easily be misleading as applied to the East in comparative studies).

Materialism, and also other non- and anti-idealist/personalist positions that in this comparative perspective have been disproportionately dominant in the West, are seen to be even more exceptional than when we regard them exclusively in the perspective of the European tradition of classical philosophy. And this is in itself an argument, a part of the case.

Thus the Eastern traditions must in a certain sense be brought within the purview of the discipline of Western philosophy and juxtaposed with its “classical philosophers” in the way Ward himself does it in other works and for which he indicates the need also in this one. I will have to return briefly to this kind of comparative thought and its import in the course of this case for idealism, in order to explain further the relation of the case for idealism and personalism to the other themes of my writing. But this is not the main concern either of this case as such, as a case in terms precisely of Western philosophy, or of Ward’s similarly delimited chapter and book.

Introduction: Philosophy by Commentary

The reader might wonder why I have not presented the straightforward philosophical case for idealism and personalism or the various positions involved in them, with reference to the discussion of those positions in current philosophy. In the discussions of my work in the history of philosophy, some of which are available in print, as well as in some of my other publications, I have already to some extent had to assume the role of philosopher in the academic world. Moreover, I have started to make in greater detail the case for Value-Centered Historicism, or a modified version of it that is congruent precisely with idealism and personalism as I understand them, through my discussion of Folke Leander’s and Claes Ryn’s work.

The main reason why I have not directly presented the basic case for idealism and personalism is simply that I find that others make that case and/or defend the general positions which they imply or build on in a way I find perfectly satisfactory. I have thought it sufficient to refer the reader to their work. They provide excellent introductions to and summaries of many of the central arguments and positions on which idealistic personalism depends, and I often have very little to add to their formulations of them. They are in many cases, as far as they go, definitive statements, in the sense in which that term is admissible in philosophy.

Philosophy is a collaborative enterprise, as Roger Scruton emphasizes, and there is naturally a considerable element of division of labour although idealists will certainly wish to avoid narrow specialization of the modern kind, which occludes the central, common insights and makes the goal of wisdom unattainable. It should be perfectly sufficient to refer to the work of others and to make it clear that one endorses and shares their conclusions. In my writing, I try primarily to do things that others have not done. Not because of any need to be original, but simply because I find these are things that really do need to be done. Also because I am in some respects and a certain sense a traditionalist, I do not find originality to be called for with regard to the formulation of those basic philosophical positions. Many people, needless to say, speak although they have nothing to say. That is wrong. Basically, they should just shut up, sit down, and read the classics.

But what I do find it meaningful to say presupposes acceptance of the work done or the conclusions reached by others and relies on and is part of a whole consisting also of the various positions which they have satisfactorily formulated and defended. And this it is important to say. And I realize that it is perhaps not enough simply to ask the reader to go to the work of the philosophers referred to. It should probably be made more clear and explicit here that their positions are also mine, that I share and support their conclusions, that the what they defend is basic and central for the things I write here and elsewhere. And it might be a good idea to explain more precisely how the things I do here and in my other publications are related to those other things.

But I hesitate to simply restate what they say in my own words. Instead, I have an idea of what might be a viable and properly unpretentious alternative. Philosophy has always to a considerable extent been commentary on the work of others, continuous commentary on classic texts has been a kind of method. This is most markedly prominent perhaps in the broader world of thought in the Vedic tradition (in the broad sense), which is of course in important respects situated outside the constitutive institutional framework of Western philosophy with its distinctive characteristics. But it is present also in Western philosophy, for instance in scholasticism.

And even modern philosophers are sometimes inclined towards it. This would seem to be especially natural in the case of idealists, who are normally more aware of the history of philosophy and, above all, must almost inevitably conceive of Western philosophy as a continuous tradition and sometimes even a whole of intrinsically and dialectically related historical positions. The method of commentary is, in short, suitable when Western philosophy properly understands that it is truly all footnotes to Plato.

The alternative to simply restating what others have done so well might be to adopt this traditionalist method and set forth the arguments and positions not only in the form of general discussion of the work of those others, but more strictly and formally as commentary on selected passages from their work. In truly traditionalist traditions, as it were, it is not just the oldest, classic works that are continuously commented on, but also later commentaries on those works. And since what my readers might perhaps legitimately ask is that I present my case for idealism and personalism in terms of contemporary philosophy and not just in the form of discussions of the history of philosophy, it is probably the recent works among my references that should be focused on for this purpose.

Keith Ward was my main D.Phil. supervisor and I have fond memories of my discussions with him, mainly in Christ Church’s Tom Quad where he lived. He is not just a respected philosopher, a leading representative of comparative theology, and centrally involved in polemical discussion with, for instance, Richard Dawkins, but he is also, and more importantly for my present purposes, a philosopher with whose formulation of at least some of the central philosophical positions I agree almost completely. Although his method of argument is not the one we find in idealists in the nineteenth-century tradition, his conclusions are, on the whole and in substance, both idealistic in the broader sense and personalistic.

I am therefore considering stating or representing here positions basic to the idealistic and personalistic worldview by presenting merely one of his summaries of some arguments against materialism, and one which should be easily accessible to philosophically interested general readers (more so, I think, than my own writing), namely the final chapter of his book The God Conclusion, published in 2009 and thus one of his most recent. I plan to select passages from this chapter, and to add to them my own comments.

It might be argued that it would be better to focus on the positive case for idealism, personalism and theism in some other book by Ward, like, for instance, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (2008), or some of his major synoptic works in comparative philosophy and theology, than on the case against materialism. But philosophical arguments are traditionally often set forth in the form of refutations of other philosophical positions, and the negative case against materialism must to some extent be included in the positive case for idealism and personalism. And since one must start somewhere, I find it reasonable to begin with that part.

Further, I prefer to choose a chapter in this book, since, as its subtitle makes clear, it deals somewhat more specifically with God in the Western philosophical tradition and this is what the present case should do also, not with elements of Christian or other religion or indeed other traditions of thought that go beyond it. Ward has dealt with Western philosophy in much greater detail in far more extensive works, but they are less relevant for my present pedagogical purpose; the selected new book provides a convenient introduction and overview.     

Of course, making the case in Ward’s terms is not wholly congenial to me. His latest book against Dawkins is called Why There Almost Certainly Is a God (2008). The debate about whether or not there is “a God” is, as Ward is himself aware, one which could in some respects appear slightly childish, pursued by materialists on the one hand and a certain kind of Biblical theists and ordinary believers on the other, both of whom are often unfamiliar with and alien to idealism in the full sense, to mysticism, to the esoteric tradition in its highest forms (which combine the insights of philosophy with tradition in the Guénonian and Coomaraswamian sense), and to Vedanta and partly similar traditions in the East. God is not “a God”.

In fact, I do not normally speak of the God conclusion at all. God is not for me a conclusion. Indeed, God is not even a postulate for me. What I say about God and spirituality is for the most part traditionalistically declaratory and thus beyond philosophy in the sense of the specifially Western discipline. There is what is. And this certainly is. We live right in the middle of it, we are part of it. When we awaken to its real nature and go deep into it, we discover and experience that it is ultimately divine. And this is not simple pantheism, there are essential distinctions, and the divine is both immanent and transcendent. It is only possible to question this that is when you do not experience it as it is.

But in Why There Almost Certainly Is a God and similar books, Ward writes primarily for readers who are used to a debate configured by the horizons of materialists and Biblical exotericists. This is not just a legitimate but an important and necessary task. It is what I feel I too am expected to do. But not being very experienced in doing it, I let Ward, with his acknowledged expertise in this field, do it for me.

I could have argued like Timothy Sprigge in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, or let him argue for me (to some extent), for a more specifically idealist position and in the methodological terms of such idealism, but that would not have served the same purpose. Moreover, Sprigge does not bring out the personalist dimension of idealism.

After having commented on the last chapter in The God Conclusion, I could perhaps proceed to deal with other parts of this book, of the other mentioned books, or still more, similar books, in the same way, gradually covering more of the positive case. But by starting with Ward’s chapter, the reader will get an introduction to and an overview of how at least some of the most basic positions I try to defend and that are implicit in the philosophy primarily of idealism in general but also to some extent personalism (I could add more of the specific arguments for personalism later) are being discussed today on a general level by one prominent defender: the positions taken with regard to materialism and the contemporary discussion about it.

As I proceed through the case, the reader will be able to understand more easily why my writing on idaelism and personalism is not considered by me to be important for historical reasons only, but are also things of contemporary and indeed permanent relevance. If her interest grows, she can then go on to read the books I recommend, some of which contain more of the detailed and so-called “technical” arguments, including the distinctive kinds of arguments used by those who describe themselves as idealists and personalists in more specific senses than Ward.

In Oxford, I also discussed the soul, for instance, with the highly technical analytical theistic philosopher Richard Swinburne in his quarters in Oriel, and other issues on other occasions. I also discussed the phenomenon of idealism being defended by analytical philosophers with the likewise highly technical analytical idealist John Foster in Brasenose, who presented the case for idealism primarily by means of symbolic logic. There are many more such philosophers out there than the reading public thinks, disproportionately preoccupied as it seems to be with the polemics of people like Dawkins.

Of course, I have some objections to analytic philosophy even when it is used in the defence of theism or idealism, inasmuch as it almost inevitably misrepresents or ignores not only some of the specific kind of reasoning that is characteristic of idealism, but also some of its substance (which is not strictly separable from the reasoning). These weaknesses are glaring in a work like J. P. Moreland’s and William Lane Craig’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.

Yet these philosophers still transcend analyticism as the complete programme it was in its early days, or what Nicholas Capaldi calls the Enlightenment project in analytic philosophy, and for this reason it is perfectly possible to draw on their work too and to coordinate it with the more specifically idealist arguments. The Enlightenment project in the broader analytic school, what Capaldi calls the analytic conversation, was a very specific, radical version of that project which has by now, as Capaldi shows, completely collapsed, although as Randall Auxier pointed out in his review in Humanitas, its many diehard adherents will not just never admit and accept that, but will hardly even notice the existence of Capaldi’s argument.

As has long been evident, it is possible to use the by now vast, technical, formal apparatus developed within the analytic tradition for purposes not just different from but opposite to the ones it was originally devised to serve. The analytic conversation has become broad and inclusive indeed. In this sense, it is misleading to continue to regard analytical philosophy as a school. Many of the important philosophers today seem to tend to transcend such limiting confines; while some may use elements from the analytic tradition, they also move freely into the intellectual territory of “continental” philosophy and not least into the past, the history of philosophy in general.

For now, my purpose is mainly a pedagogical one, to indicate in broad outline to the general reader the kind of philosophical reasoning that we find today about the kind of worldview I – imperfectly – try to defend. Again, for this purpose, Ward’s presentation of general philosophical arguments in the context of the kind of debate produced by the polemics of Dawkins (the title The God Conclusion is of course a response to Dawkins’s The God Delusion) and others like him (Ward has written many more such books), not the more specialized and technical works or, for that matter, Ward’s own major works in comparative theology, is, I think, a good point of departure.

It is fully admissible to use a presentation of the arguments which is simple in comparison to the detailed, “technical” works, since the latter are often necessary only for the deepened understanding of particular points and quite a few of the arguments, positions and truths of the positions I affirm are in fact in important respects, and in some cases essentially, simple in themselves. It is perfectly legitimate and entirely in accord with the elaborate, detailed and technical analyses to express them as such when possible. Indeed, expressing them as such, as Ward does in the book I will focus on, expressing their intrinsic simplicity, expressing this simplicity in a commensurate simple style, is an advanced art of philosophical writing, which is found in some of the greatest classics of this discipline and which is indeed a major part of what makes them classics.

Needless to say, Ward’s text is not of the same kind as the texts normally commented on in traditions where commentary is a central and dominant practice. In the Vedic tradition, the Sutras of Vedanta, for instance, are extremely short, but not at all simple and clear. They are compact and elliptic, and for this very reason they require commentary. The verses of the other categories of scriptures are of course quite different too. Even the commentaries on those kinds of texts are themselves a kind of text very different from Ward’s. The same is true with reference to other traditions.

But my purpose is different from the ones of those traditions. First of all, it is for me not the commentary itself that is most important. The traditionalist commentaries of the kind mentioned are commentaries on generally familiar texts, texts which all readers are supposed to know well, and it is what the commentator himself says about those texts that is the focus of interest. In my case, it is the text commented on, its making of the case, that is the main thing. I let the text make the case since I see no reason to do it in my own text, and use the latter merely for some clarifications and further distinctions and minor points, and in order to relate the case to the other themes of my own writing.

What I find useful and relevant is simply the method of commentary in itself, the method of commentary as exposition, which I will apply to a contemporary philosophical text for the different purpose which is exclusively didactic, exclusively a purpose of pedagogical communication, and which, above all, allows me primarily to use that text itself for this purpose.

I think the example of the mentioned traditions of commentary clearly reveals the superiority of this method of exposition. The classic text, or, in my case, the text that makes the case in a way that makes it superfluous for me to make it – is always brought along and kept foremost in the minds of the readers. Tradition is ever carried on, unbroken. It can be developed and modified, but not distorted by being lost from view. No monstrous new quantities of text reinventing the wheel are needed.

This is indeed more than a method of exposition. It is a method of thought itself. I am uncomfortable with the exaggerated stress on originality in the modern West. It is this evaluation that has produced the innumerable new, loose, seemingly independent treatises which by their very form and organization (or lack of it) tend to obscure or play down the philosophical tradition, and thus fail – except for the extraordinary reader, who will, however, have to add the mental exertion himself – appropriately to situate themselves in the larger universe of thought to which in reality they inevitably belong and which would inevitably reveal the degree of originality to be much lower than author and readers generally think.

This development, widely parodied in the nineteenth century and certainly also before that, has brought out, in the course of the progress of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, many of the less promising potentialities of philosophy as it existed already in antiquity, especially the conception of philosophy as in principle anti-traditional in a way which made difficult the transmission and gradual accumulation of acquired insight.

Contrary to this complex of phenomena, to which of course every writer to some extent has to conform under today’s conditions of publication, commentary enables me not only to signal my intended unoriginality with regard to the basic case for idealism and personalism, but also present that case in the traditionalist mode with all of its distinctive advantages.

Those advantages, among which are primarily the increased precision and general discipline, I find, interestingly, to have been unambiguously confirmed by many years’ experience of philosophical discussion in an advanced moderated philosophical discussion forum on the internet, where each post, except in the case where the post initiates a new discussion, contains citations from the ones responded to, followed by the inevitably comparatively disciplined and precise analyses, comments and criticisms of the cited text only.

Both there and here in the blog format, the latest technologies thus facilitate and indeed make possible and easily realizable the rediscovery, restoration and renewal of traditional methods which simply allow for a new degree of precision and, generally, a higher intellectual level. This consideration is, I think, a decisive one for the evaluation of the new genre or at least publication form that is the blog post, the potential of which I have sought to assess in a number or earlier articles.

Being different in purpose and substance, my commentary will also, however, be different from many traditionalist commentaries in form inasmuch as it will not display any remarkable compositional or stylistic qualities, being – as I now conceive it – quickly written merely to provide a certain requisite and heretofore missing completeness in my writing on certain subjects and themes. But this could change in the future.

The question may also be raised whether we will not be moving, with Ward, into theology rather than philosophy. Does not Ward defend general theism, not idealism and personalism? It is quite acceptable for me simply to answer no to the first question. But on the other hand, I would not object to moving into theology, if theology is understood precisely as Ward understands it. He rejects the view of theology as a confessional apologetic discipline, and regards it instead as “the systematic intellectual study of beliefs and practices concerning theos, God”, beliefs which “need not be those of any specific religious organisation.” In a sense, he says, he is equating theology and metaphysics defined as the study of “what, if anything, is ultimately real or of supreme transcendent value”: “Aristotle’s Metaphysics…could equally well have been called his Theology. It certainly contains important discussions of God and of the ultimate nature of things. It is not, of course, Christian, but Christian theology is only one sub-branch of general theology.” The common term philosophical theology is of course also adequate here.

Theologians normally hold – religious – beliefs about the ultimate reality, Ward admits (and here we immediately see, in his use of the term “belief”, some of the difference between his approach and that of the more complete idealist, as it were; I will have to return to that in a later article, but see also my article – in Swedish – entitled ‘Kognitivism, Realism, Idealism’). But this does not prevent their work from being “properly philosophical”. Many philosophers hold beliefs, Ward points out; they are even extremely dogmatic about them, and they use philosophy as apologetics in favour of them. Such dogmatism on the part of philosophers with non-religious beliefs may be less philosophical than rational metaphysics or philosophical theology which includes religious belief:

“It is quite possible for a metaphysical philosopher to decide that there are good reasons for believing that there is a God. In that case it will be reasonable to think that God may have revealed the divine nature and purpose, and not just left it to humans to discover such things (which are probably hidden in the recesses of the divine mind) for themselves. If one such revelation is judged to be authentic, it will be reasonable to incorporate its content into a general metaphysical system…The divine revelation will not contradict the metaphysics, presumably, but it may fulfil it and modify it in some respects. In that case, a metaphysician may turn into a systematic theologian, by incorporating into the metaphysical system some data obtained from revelation…This exactly captures the position of philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, who took the philosophy of Aristotle and modified it in accordance with Christian revelation to form what they believed to be a more adequate philosophical view.”

I cite this (from an earlier chapter of The God Conclusion) to show what, in my view too, theology is, and why the possible move into it is not problematic. Theology is, in Ward’s definition as well as historically in the case of Christian theology, not opposed to philosophy, but rather a certain use of philosophy; it is certainly not the same as Church dogmatics. I have already discussed this in some of my texts on the history of philosophy (in Swedish).

Neither is the suspected defence of theism rather than idealism and personalism in the case of Ward problematic, and for the same reasons. I certainly also defend idealism and personalism in terms of theism, defined in a certain way of course. But in fact Ward does not just speak about theism, but also, and in contradistinction to Swinburne, Moreland and similar analytical theists, often explicitly in terms precisely of idealism and personalism.

Roman copy of Lysippos.

Photo: Eric Gaba

Paul Otto: Humboldt-Denkmal, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Photo: Jan Mehlich